Comcast and Tivo have made some sort of deal. This is fabulous news.

THE HOUSEBOAT

Back in September, the gang did the annual houseboat trip. For the second year running, we went to Lake Don Pedro. It’s smaller than Shasta, but it’s closer, and it’s quite a bit warmer, which is important if you’re renting the boat after Labor Day. The biggest and best houseboats on the lake come from Moccasin Point Marina, and the biggest and best houseboat at Moccasin Point is the 70′ Millennium Deluxe Houseboat. Four private bedrooms, 2 full baths, and a hot tub that seats six. Woo hoo.

Underway, on the flying bridge

The interior, complete with that “lived in” look

Naturally, all houseboats must come equipped with a slide

Here’s a 360 degree view of the upper deck that was stitched together from a bunch of still shots. Thanks, Jack!

THE ACTIVITIES

Other people might use a houseboat as a platform from which to swim, sail, jet ski, or waterski. We use the houseboat as a platform from which to float on innertubes and drink beer. Over the years, we’ve had a chance to perfect our technique. There have been three landmark improvements over the years:

1. Enough floatation devices. At some point, everybody’s going to want to be in the water at the same time, and nobody’s going to want to have to tread water. In addition to involving exercise, which nobody wants, treading water makes it infernally difficult to keep your beer above water.

2. The Inflatable Beer Cooler. You’re basking in the sunshine, floating gently on the surface of the lake, and suddenly disaster strikes… YOU FINISH YOUR BOTTLE OF BEER. You have only two choices, and neither are palatable. You can stay out on the water and slowly perish of thirst. Or you can make the arduous paddling journey back to the houseboat for a refill. (Remember, exercise is bad.) To the rescue comes…

THE INFLATABLE BEER COOLER

The cooler contains ice, Coronas, and those critical pre-prepared slices of lime. It comes equipped with a bottle opener, and has a zippable lid for maximum beer security. Once it’s tied securely to one of the innertubes, houseboaters at leisure no longer need worry about the frequent trips up to the houseboat for refills.

3. The Beer Transport System. The inflatable beer cooler has a tragic flaw. If you drift away from the appointed Guardian of the Cooler, you may need to exert yourself in order to get to the cooler for a refill. Then we’re right back to exercise again (darn it!). We put our best engineering minds on the problem, and devised an elegant and powerful solution. Presenting…

THE BEER TRANSPORT SYSTEM®

Combine a radio controlled boat, a pool drink caddy, a tidy bit of rope, and a healthy dose of MacGyver, and you can build a nuclear reactor. But if you don’t have a MacGyver handy, you can create a Beer Transport System®. Two sober and responsible houseboaters are selected for beer transport duty. (If there are no sober and responsible houseboaters, two ordinary ones will do.) One of them takes the traditional role of the Guardian of the Cooler. One of them takes on a new role, the Guardian of the Remote Control. For some reason, this role is almost always undertaken by someone of the male persuasion.

When somebody is empty, the machine chugs into motion. The beer transport system is carefully (soberly, responsibly) driven to the inflatable beer cooler. The Guardian of the Cooler fills the cup holders in the beer trailer with an appropriate number of frosty beverages, taking care to balance the weight as much as possible. Lime wedges can be placed in one of the empty spots. The beer bottles fit snugly in the cup holders, thus ensuring no losses in the event of a major Beer Transport System Calamity. The lime wedges are not as secure, but they are only lime wedges, and thus are expendable.

The loaded beer transport system is then carefully (soberly, responsibly) driven to the empty beer victim. Depending on the victim’s position in the water, this may involve driving the beer transport system very quickly towards the victim’s head, which is the source of great entertainment to the Guardian of the Remote Control. The empty beer victim puts her empty bottle into an empty cup holder, takes a fresh one, opens it with the attached bottle opener, and carefully inserts a lime wedge. Disaster is averted, and nobody had to exert themselves in any way.

Here’s a very brief, but very effective movie that should give you a better idea of the process.

THE MISHAP

Previous houseboat trips have involved small mishaps. Propellers have been broken. The boat has gone adrift more times than I can count. One particular incident culminated in all of the houseboaters jumping up and down in unison at the back of the boat in an attempt to free the boat from the shore where it was wedged like a beached whale (no, it didn’t work). This year, the most notable incident was a simple slip in the mud.

On Lake Don Pedro, you don’t anchor the boat, but simply tie it off to stakes that are driven into the ground. Making landfall can be tricky, as there’s a lot of mud at the waterline. Thus, the slip in the mud was funny (naturally), but not really noteworthy. Until somebody pointed out the forensic evidence that was left behind…

If you study the picture, you can see exactly what happened. When the victim landed, both feet slid forward, and he landed flat on his back. His right hand was wrapped around the handle of a mallet (used for hammering stakes into the ground), and he didn’t react quickly enough to release it. He was wearing shorts with an elastic waistband and a T-shirt. And it’s all right there in the picture. See?

I upgraded to MovableType 3.1 and TypeKey in order to get rid of spam comments. This of course, resulted in my blog being broken for a while, and my comment system being broken for a while longer. To any spammers out there: in case you didn’t know, you suck.

Everything should be limping along again. Now I just have to deal with the backlog of things I’ve wanted to blog about for the last 2 months.

… does such intriguing things to one’s abilities. We’ve been working 10-11 hour days this week trying to get to a milestone. Yesterday evening, I heard somebody try to describe a bug. Instead of “when you fill in values in this property inspector”, he came out with “when you… do this… you know… put the … numbers in the… boxes”. It took me five tries to type the command to grab the current source code on my Mac. It was “p4 snyc”, “p4 xyn”, “p4s ync\”, and so on until I tried squinting and using only two fingers (“p” “4” “space” “s” “y” “n” “c” “enter”). Shortly after that, I got up out of my chair and walked into my cubicle wall. I don’t mean that I clipped it a bit with my shoulder as I walked out. I body checked it, hard enough to make me spin around and stumble. (Fortunately, nobody saw this.) And conversations around the office have gotten increasingly odd, as nobody is really alert enough to follow what anyone else is saying. They’re really not so much conversations as sets of non sequiturs.

Looking forward to catching up on some non-thinking down time this weekend. I’m too old to do this much thinking per day.

If you play piano and have ever wanted to pick up boogie woogie, Learn Boogie Woogie Piano kicks some serious butt. I’m classically trained, which means that I can play like the dickens but have no clue how to improvise. It’s rare to find this sort of a primer that targets the right skill level (I can sight read it, but it’s not too easy). It shows you lots of building blocks, drills you on them, and teaches you how to put it together. It’s the best music purchase I’ve made in a long time.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to learn how to shuffle poker chips. I’ve been trying to really nail down the perfect shuffle. This is where you get exactly one chip from the left stack, then one from the right, and so on. If you started with 4 red chips and 4 green chips
R R R R G G G G

Okay, I’ve been practising shuffling poker chips while working, and I’m starting to get the hang of it. I can do two stacks of five with about a 50% success rate, but only under the right conditions. If I try to shuffle Dalbir’s 11.5 gram poker chips instead of my 9 gram poker chips, it doesn’t work. If I look away from the chips, it doesn’t work. If somebody else is watching me, it doesn’t work. If I try it on the slippery tables in the conference rooms, it doesn’t work. If there’s too much humidity, it doesn’t work. If I’m wearing purple, it doesn’t work. You get the idea.

It’s amazing how long it takes to learn a motor skill once you’re all grown up. Let this be a lesson to you parents out there… get little Mary Lou started on chip shuffling now if you ever want her to hustle poker.

I’m trying to learn how to shuffle together stacks of poker chips with one hand. The chips keep ending up on the floor, and I think I’m developing a repetitive stress injury. If anybody has advice, I’d appreciate it.

Pink just blogged about the crappy UI on the remote control for his new receiver. I have the best remote control in the universe, so I thought I’d mention it here: Home Theater Master MX-700. It has hard buttons instead of a touch screen, so you can operate it without looking at it. It’s also really universal. Not universal in the sense of “it does all of the common functions for most of the devices, but if you want to set the clock on the VCR, you’ll need the VCR’s dedicated remote”. Universal in the sense of “it does everything, so all the other remotes have had their batteries removed and are being stored in the garage”. It’s expensive, but it’s SO worth it.

I highly recommend MythBusters on the Discovery channel for any fellow science geeks with a slightly destructive bent. When they test out whether CD-ROMs shatter at high RPMs, they use a ballistics dummy to catch all of the shrapnel. In the same episode, both co-hosts have narrow escapes… one from a pressure chamber that loses its seal, the other from exploding gas fumes. Good stuff.